What is Conversational Marketing? An Ultimate Guide for 2024

Conversational marketing has evolved as a trend and now, it is serving as a top digital marketing technique. Due to its effectiveness and ROI, businesses are leveraging it. Thus, to drive growth and provide a better customer experience, conversations should happen all across the customer journey. To understand conversational marketing precisely, we have prepared a guide that will make you understand a lot about it.

What is Conversational Marketing?

Conversational Marketing is a way of engaging with website visitors and translating leads through dialogue-driven activities. This inbound marketing technique focuses on consumer interactions to develop relationships with the consumer. It builds trust through conversations and makes the purchasing experience as smooth and easy as possible.

Basically, it is all about combining your marketing activities directly with the sales team, ideally through one platform, so the user has a seamless journey down the funnel. 

Let’s move forward and learn about its benefits

Benefits of Conversational Marketing

It is important to understand that when we talk about adding conversational marketing as a part of your inbound marketing strategies, it does not lead to any disruption in any of your existing processes. Rather it can act as an alternative to what’s already performing for your business regarding lead generation, sales, and customer service.

Benefits of implementing conversational marketing are

• Accumulate more accurate data about your audience.
• Enhancing customer satisfaction
• Generating leads and sales through new channels.
•  24/7 availability and can be automated.
• Creating stronger relationships thanks to personalization.
• Saving time (shorter sales cycle).

Conversational marketing can give a push to your strategy without letting you modify your existing processes. 

Conversational Marketing Framework

Here, the conversational marketing framework involves 3 stages engage, understand, and recommend.

1. Engage

Engage is a first step, where you connect with people who visit your page. Instead of using irritating popups or boring lead generation forms, consider using a chatbot to start a friendly conversation with your website’s visitors.

Marketing chatbots are an engaging solution as it allows you to personalize them based on your brand’s voice and your audience’s act. Although, they can either be scripted or powered by AI

It all depends on the chatbot’s script and the user’s intent. This conversation can guide your audience to become a part of your sales funnel- either as leads or new customers.

What makes chatbots so powerful is that they are automated and can lend support 24/7. In addition, you can customize the conversation based on different parameters. Chatbots can act as a customer service tool answering queries about your product or service or a lead generation and sales tool gathering emails and enabling your users to go through their buyer’s journey.

Furthermore, rapidly evolving AI technology will soon allow chatbots to interact with your website’s visitors fully. As a result, they will smartly answer most questions and fix the issues currently managed by customer service reps.

2. Understand

This stage is all about understanding who your audience is. To simplify this process, you have to do customer segmentation that will ensure that you focus on qualified leads only. Earlier, this process required a lot of time and effort from your sales team. But with AI, You can build and maintain a relationship with your leads by setting up the right marketing automation system for your email nurturing to qualify them.

Moreover, leads can be qualified and segmented in a few ways. Firstly, you can design a chatbot that allows them to choose one of the given options/answers. Depending on their answer, you can personalize the content and give offers that suit their needs. All you need to do is to set up the right script for chatbots asking qualifying questions and accumulate this data.

In addition, chatbots can automatically watch the behaviour of your website’s visitors without them having to interact with a bot. Therefore, you don’t need to use advanced analytics tools because chatbots can quickly segment your audience based on your selected properties.

Lastly, you can also build so-called conversational landing pages, where your team can join one-on-one with your prospects and answer their queries in real-time using a chatbot or live chat. Moreover, explore video call SDK for enhanced communication capabilities and create a seamless and interactive experience.

3. Recommend

The third and last stage is recommended. Once your chatbot starts engaging with your website’s visitors and collects some data about them, it might be the right time to give the matter into human hands. Bots are great as they can accomplish easy, repetitive tasks and get to know your audience’s preferences. But to move them to the last stage of the funnel — buy — human interaction might be required.

When you collect all the relevant data, your sales team has a much better idea of all customer segments — how they act and what they expect. This lets your sales rep personalize the buyer’s journey and ultimately convert your prospects into customers. By integrating call management software, you can design your chatbot in such a way that it suggests a call or chat with your sales rep after running through the automatic qualification phase.

To automate and optimize this process further, you can integrate your employees’ calendars and show a link to book a call. It’s a great solution as it enables both sides to save tons of time and be fully prepared for the last decision phase of the sales process. All in all, chatbots can act as a powerful tool for moving your audience through their buyer journey. 

How to Create a Conversational Marketing Strategy?

Every business has its own conversational marketing strategy but here are a few things that you need to follow while implementing it.

1. Choosing The Questions and Answers

Understanding the audience and the type of questions they are likely to ask is the tool to fix this problem through the various channels, be it online chat, bot-based chat, live streaming, and even shared inbox, what gets essential is knowing the kind of questions related to the businesses and pre-record answers accordingly in the system. When it comes to conversational marketing, you know the purpose or the assistance you will provide via chat. 

The determination of the CTA is what needs to be clear, the visitor is will get a pop up of the chat to help in getting a purchase or to land on another specific page of the website or to respond to the general FAQs about the website is what needs to be clear beforehand and in the case of a bot-based system, recorded in the features. 

2. Personalization  

Personalization is a key to attracting any customer. Personalized chat depends upon what the customer is likely to ask for, at what page the customer is, and based on the customer’s prior activities, the customer can have conversion and go in the right direction at the right time being of most benefit. 

Relevance and on-point answers are of great help in creating customer relationships. It can be done by timely experimenting with the chatbot-based conversation and optimization to let the conversation flow in the direction of the findings.

3. Asking for Feedbacks

Post the conversation; you can ask for feedback about the chat system. It will allow the customer to feel that they have a voice and help optimize the tools. 

For instance, if a website has a target timer of a popup message when there is a visitor on the same page for over a minute and after that, a chatbot is to help. 

Getting feedback from visitors is likely to tell if chatbot assistance was helpful. The timer can be diminished, or they can tell how they were looking for a straightforward option to connect to an executive via a phone call the whole time. The conversation was not of any precise help based upon their experiences making the company go for improvisation.

Metrics To Measure Conversational Marketing 

Lastly, it’s time to understand how to measure whether your conversational marketing strategy brings you the expected outcomes. You need to monitor a few key factors to notice if your results are satisfying. Moreover, it will also give you a fair idea about what needs to be enhanced and adjusted.

1. Improved lead engagement

Chatbots help you engage your website’s visitors and convert them into potential customers. With over 41% of consumers looking for assistance while buying online because they can’t find answers to easy questions, chatbots have a huge potential to bridge this gap and engage website visitors. To achieve faster conversion and employ personalized communication strategies, utilizing website visitor identification software is beneficial. It tracks real-time website visits, enhancing lead qualification and boosting sales conversion rates.

To measure how active your customers are while interacting with your business, you should observe metrics such as chatbots interactions, the time spent on your website, or several accumulated emails. Moreover, people who have interacted with your chatbot or customer support agents rely on your brand more and are more active leads and, eventually, loyal customers.

2. Lower customer acquisition cost

Another metric you should monitor is your CAC (customer acquisition cost). You should review your data and find answers to the following questions:

• Did chatbots let you lower CAC?
• What’s the CAC before and after executing conversational marketing?
• Have you been able to get more deals thanks to automating your sales process?

Observing this factor will let you understand how chatbots contribute to your development. For example, in some cases, you could have enhanced your customer support and gotten more awesome business reviews thanks to more people who have heard about your product or service. Lowering the CAC can also suggest scaling closing deals with customers who usually need to contact your sales representatives or customer support before purchasing.

3. Improved NPS

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an important metric to assess customers’ loyalty to a company. Utilizing conversational marketing help you improve your customer experience, demonstrating to your customers that their needs are your priority.

Monitoring your NPS after adding conversational marketing to your strategy is essential. If it’s enhanced and you are gaining more loyal and happy customers, it means the solution is working well. In addition, pay attention to your reviews on prevalent sites, such as Capterra or G2. 

4. Shortened sales cycle

Lastly, conversational marketing allows you to automate your sales process and shorten the cycle. For instance, instead of responding to FAQ related to your pricing or offer in general, your chatbots can deliver this information automatically. They can also follow up with whoever interacted with them in the past, for instance, showing a discount to a returning customer.

Conversational marketing utilizing chatbots lets your customer support agents and sales reps focus on closing deals needing human-to-human interaction.

When your website’s visitors acquire all the important information about your product or service via chatbot conversation, they can make a purchasing decision much faster.

Therefore, you must compare the time utilized for closing deals before and after executing this solution for your business.

Conclusion

In this blog, we have learned a lot about conversational marketing. We tried to understand its meaning, benefits, strategies, and metrics to measure it. As this marketing concept is gaining more popularity, you should not miss out on this opportunity. Also, your customers expect their experience to be personalized to their requirements and wants. Conversational marketing is a great method to facilitate that without making big modifications to your marketing strategy as a whole.